Catify DIY

Tessa here. Mom was so happy when she read all your compliments on our Catwalk. She sure did a good job, BUT I want to point out that I’m the chief designer!

Here’s Mom’s original version: two wall shelves, connected with some sort of weird bridge. Kajsa was very interested. Many of you know that we call her the Queen of Indecision as she’s very careful and needs a lot of time to make up her mind.

This picture is Kajsa in a nutshell: she stands on 3 legs, moving one foreleg forward, pretending to take the next step…

… only to take her paw back.

And forward. And back. And forward. And maybe, or maybe not, go one step. She was standing there for over an hour, moving her foreleg back and forth, until she decided that it’s not safe to walk on this bridge. At least for now. After a small break, she can continue with her decision-making progress for another hour.

Our human doesn’t take Kajsa’s indecision issues seriously as Kajsa always needs a lot of time to make up her mind. When she finally left the lower shelf, it was my turn to inspect Mom’s work. (Sigh. It’s not only our human who’s running out of patience when it gets to indecisive cats!) I had a look at the bridge, put 1 foot on it, and knew immediately that it won’t carry me. I left. Done.

When Mom saw me turning away, she knew that she’d have to come up with a different solution. So here’s what you saw yesterday: 3 wall shelves.

What did I say? I’m the chief designer! Ok, Mom frames it slightly differently, “if kamikaze cat is concerned about the Laws of Physics, it has to be really dangerous”, but the result is the same. I’m the chief designer. Now, where’s my paycheck?

Like this:

We live in a 45 m2- apartment (485 ft2), so I wanted to utilize any space for the cats. The hat rack belongs to the apartment, and I immediately decided to catify it. The result turned out well, but was much more work than I thought!

The surface of your hat rack is important when you want to turn it into a platform for cats. If you have a similar rack like ours, you’ll need a shelf to give your cats a safe landing strip. Cats are balancing masters, but they need an even surface for a safe landing.

It doesn’t matter what shelf you take, but keep in mind that you have to fix it to the hat rack. If the hat rack is your own, you can simply bolt the shelf on it. If it’s not your own, you probably don’t want to drill. This Lack wall shelf from Ikea consists of two parts, which is why I could fasten the shelf with a string to the hat rack.

I was surprised that the cats couldn’t jump from the brown shelf to the rack! I tried to tease them with their favorite treats, but they didn’t dare to jump. I still don’t really understand the problem. I wonder if the “jump path” is too straight? It can’t be height because they leap higher to other places.

I built a very simple cat ladder to help them.

I bolted two longer and four shorter bars to a ladder, and wrapped sisal ropes around the bars. I bolted the ladder to the white rack, but didn’t tack it to the brown shelf.

Both cats climbed the ladder without problems, but it was very difficult to get from the ladder to the white shelf because its surface was too slippery. I nailed a white bathroom matt to the white shelf to give their claws something to grip. I wasn’t sure if nailing was a good solution in the long run, but the matt has now been there for over 6 months.

Success! They could finally get to the hat rack themselves, and it soon became one of the most popular spots! The ladder also works as a scratching post although they normally prefer cardboard to sisal.

I was first worried that Tessa doesn’t have a second exit to escape Kajsa, but it actually never became a problem. Then again – Tessa found of course a second way to climb down…

The hat rack was worth the trouble, but I was surprised that human furniture need so much adjustment for cats. The material wasn’t expensive, except the sisal rope: I spent about 20€ on sisal here, and this ladder is quite short.

Like this:

Mom used to keep our cat grass on top of a cupboard we didn’t have access to (bah), and offered it only under supervision. She had to secure the soil with her fingers while we plucked the grass: if she didn’t, the grass would fall out of its container and become a mess. And ahem, of course it was also fun to play with it.

There aren’t any “safe” spots with daylight at our new place, so she wanted to build a cat-proof grass pot. One day she was extremely satisfied with herself, and started one of her carpenter projects. I was of course suspicious.

It’s probably easiest to buy the picture frame first and keep looking for pots. Be creative, ours is an ashtray!

How to build the cat grass dispenser

– nail / screw the chicken wire to the frame
– find a solution how to fix the glass of the picture frame at the bottom. (Keep in mind that you’ve to remove it every time you plant new grass!)

If you a really lucky, you can use the original mechanism. You could also use nails to hold the glass, but this didn’t work out for us. Mom eventually gave up and taped the glass to the frame. She also thought about replacing the glass with wooden material (so much easier to work with!). However, you have to water grass, and glass is a perfect material for moisture.

Oh yes, this is perfect! The cat grass is on the window sill without getting into a mess. We’ve free access. The chicken wire keeps the soil and grass in place.

P.S. Since we’ve now written a post on cat grass: Mom waters grass with a spray bottle to equally spread the water. She doesn’t need to apply the water directly on the soil – she pretends that it’s “raining” and sprays the grass.

_____________________________

Full disclosure: Mom didn’t come up with this idea, but she doesn’t remember where she had heard about it. You know, somebody mentioned somewhere something…

Like this:

Huhu. The year is going to its end and we totally forgot to show you all the peaks of our “new” place!

Mom’s very proud of her carpenter skills, so we allowed her to boast about some of her works. First off is the former pink hell. She bought on Ebay a massive pink ladder for 5€ (5$) . It was probably that cheap because pink is not a very popular color when it comes to ladders, hehe.

She removed every second step. She then joined two steps to an angle to give us something to sit on.

She got finally use of stuff she had bought about a year ago: a rope ladder with wooden round steps and a long blue rope. Mom twisted the blue rope around the wooden slippery steps to give us a better grip, and nailed the rope ladder to the pink-hell ladder.

White paint beat the pink hell and some extra rope eases our climbing work. She also secured the ladder with some screws to the cupboard.

You may wonder why we need the pink hell white ladder as we already have a climbing tree next to the cupboard. Well, Kajsa is the boss at our place, and Tessa isn’t always allowed to climb over Kajsa to get on top of the cupboard. Now we have two accesses to the top of the climbing tree and cupboard. In fact, Mom always tries to give Tessa an emergency exit because she’s afraid that Tessa gets stuck somewhere.

Oh yes, Mom’s very proud of herself, and we’ve to admit that she did a good job. It’s fun climbing on the ladder and Tessa is often using the other exit. Mom’s also happy that the ladder melts into the interior. Good for her – we don’t care so much whether the ladder is pink or white.

Well, there’s one thing Mom doesn’t like about the ladder – it gives us access to the shelving, hehe. It’s so much fun to tilt books!

Of course this silly human of mine started squeaking, and I admit that I loved the attention. So yes, I was very satisfied with myself in this wonderful basket: Mom and Granny admired me, and I could even sunbathe for some time in the morning.

However, this doesn’t mean that Mom can just copy this spot at our place. She got me a similar basket, and placed it on a “sunny” (we live in Finland…) shelf.

Can you believe that she even tried to get me interested with a treat?? She’s hopeless – of course I won’t use this basket! It’s important to keep humans on their toes, because it’s dangerous when they become too confident.

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To be the mouse or the cat

One human, two cats and “Not-Me” living in the suburbs of Helsinki. Which one of us can only play when the other one’s away? I think the human is the cat and my cats are the mice. I’ll explain why as soon as I get this butt off my face.

I suffer from depression and anxiety disorder, and I also write about the impact of cats on mental health.

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